Lawrence Weiner (1942-2021) was at the forefront of the conceptualism movement of the 1960s. As his iconic graphic text works show, the language was the artist’s primary medium. Investigating how words connote meanings and how an individual perceives them, he challenged the conventions of art and reconstructed the relationship between audiences and artworks. As a tribute to Weiner’s creations and significance in conceptual art, Sedition revisits interviews with Lawrence Weiner.
Lawrence Weiner published a digital moving image of his work The Sky Moves with Sedition back in 2013 and shared his approaches to the digital realm in the interview.
A Still from The Sky Moves by Lawrence Weiner
“When you see the work on the wall, it says the same aphorism, ‘WHEN THE STARS STAND STILL, THE SKY MOVES’. But in fact, when you have it on the app when you have it on the screen, you see it in a way that that particular artist, that particular moment would show you how it possibly could exist. It is just another aspect of how it presents the work.” - 
In the interview with Sedition at his exhibition Within A Realm Of Distance in 2015, Weiner also explained how he approached the text as a material and how he created a situation with site-specific installations.
“The idea with my work is if it really is about the material, then it doesn’t have a metaphor. Nobody has to expect your value structure in order to interact with it. And you can use it yourself to make your own metaphor to understand where you are.”
Lawrence Weiner at Within A Realm Of Distance at Blenheim Palace, Courtesy of Blenheim Art Foundation, Photo credit: Hugo Glendinning
“What counts is what you see when you look at the screen. If it works, it does something to do with your relations to the world, that’s great. If it doesn’t amplify or diminish anything.”